Is “taking everything personally” a marketable skill?

Hello dear sisters,

I’m feeling a lot of big feelings this school year. Most significantly, I’m feeling very disillusioned with my teaching career. Why exactly? What’s the matter with teaching right now? To quote the Billy Elliot movie, “what’re you after, a list?”

My union has been in contract negotiations since last year. We still do not technically have a contract this year. Negotiations are not going well and have gone into mediation. The district wants us to accept that they will no longer cover 100% of the premium for our lowest-deductible health insurance plan. They want to us to accept a .5% raise when inflation is, well, you know, a lot more than .5%. We got our first paychecks of the school year on Monday (yup, we started school a month ago and just got paid) and so many people were heartbroken (and stressed) to note that their paychecks had decreased since last year.

15 years of experience, a Master’s degree, and I’m taking home less each month than I was last year. It might actually end up being less than I took home the year before that.

Last night, I attended a school board work session and watched colleague after colleague tell the board how much less they seem to be worth to the district this year. Big feelings all around.

This morning, I felt sick to my stomach when I saw “Policy Changes: Pronouns” on the staff meeting agenda. Thanks to transphobic legislation passed by our Republican-controlled state legislature, teachers should now only use a student’s chosen pronouns with express permission from their parents. In practice, that means if a child trusts me with that information but thinks home won’t be supportive, I have two options: out them to unsupportive parents, or ignore what they’ve told me about themselves and their truth. Both of these options suck.

Additionally, staff are not obligated to honor pronoun changes from students/families. I have such a hard time understanding why someone would become a teacher if they’re not interested in supporting their students. I hated learning which of my colleagues don’t really care about the greater good during a public health crisis… I really don’t want to discover a colleague that doesn’t care about supporting trans and gender-nonconforming students. Hard to work with folks day in and day out when you can’t fundamentally respect or trust them anymore.

So pay cuts and institutionalized transphobia… that’s two things.

I’ll save the rest of my grievances for another time.

Dusting off my resume,

Abby

On saying goodbye to the goodest boy

Oh hey sisters.

As I consider the complete lack of posts in this blog in 2021, my thoughts are telling me to justify my absence and address the VAST AMOUNTS OF AWFUL that have transpired in the world in that time. But my therapist would say that thoughts are just words and I’m not obliged to respond. SO I WON’T. I’m writing this post and shutting down my own need to apologize for the hiatus (and for the fact that I might write this post and then disappear back into the void). With Jess’s voice in my head, I say… apology rejected.

*deep breath*

We are saying goodbye to our 13-year-old husky, Takk. I’m drafting this post in the weird purgatory between acknowledging the fact that his health is failing and the date of his euthanasia appointment. Can I just say that I am struggling significantly with how to describe this? I feel largely ambivalent or perhaps negative toward euphemisms for death. I can’t quite bring myself to say we’re “putting him to sleep.” “Putting him down” feels even worse. There are no perfect words for “we’ve put so much thought and so many tears into reaching the decision that the kindest and most loving thing we can do for our buddy is to let him go before his pain overwhelms him.”

We met Takk at the Rapid City Humane Society in 2009. He’d been taken in as a stray. His kennel was a poopy mess. The staff had named him Scuba Steve. I mean, the boy clearly NEEDED US. A week later I drove him home after his neuter appointment and he sang me the song of his people most of the way.

The humane society staff gave us a lecture on husky behavior before we adopted him- how he would definitely be overwhelmingly energetic and would attempt to escape any area we put him in. Maggie apparently gave him a similar lecture entitled “That’s Not How We Do Things Here.” He promptly became the most chill husky to ever exist. Walks? Great. Naps? Better.

Takk has been a steadfast and faithful friend as we moved from SoDak and made our home in Montana. He had a brief destructive phase that included eating a baby gate handle and chewing on a chair. More recently, he enjoys throwing the occasional party with shredded Kleenex confetti while we’re at work (I caught him with a tissue in his mouth one morning before leaving and he was so deeply put out by the whole situation).

Takk was a trooper through two different knee surgeries- though I must note that he was a very pitiful sad boi while on heavy-duty pain meds. We took turns sleeping on the living room floor with him because he would wake up loopy and distressed during the night.

He also had a brief career as an influencer for Rachael Ray.

We celebrated Takk’s thirteenth birthday in January… and this week we are saying goodbye. When we adopted Takk, we made a promise, to him and to each other, that we would do right by him. We intend to follow through on that promise.

My heart hurts.

Hug your pets,

Abby

I hate it here.

This was living in my drafts. It is several months old, but I decided to post it anyway.

Scene: 7 am Monday morning, 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are trying to get out the door to school when the youngest child starts a nasty coughing fit. It catches my attention because she did sound a little stuffy when I woke her up 20 minutes ago. I wait, assuming it will subside, but it doesn’t. I maybe wouldn’t be so concerned were it not for the fact that yesterday started exactly the same way. Yesterday her symptoms subsided by mid-morning. But now what? Her school has a “symptom-free” policy this year, for which I am incredibly grateful. I don’t want to be “that parent” who sends their kid with what turns out to be covid because they assumed it was just allergies. No fever. But there’s that cough again. And then she sneezes all over her sister’s yogurt. She makes the “I don’t feel good” face. I pass her a Kleenex.

Dammit.

So now I have to choose between being “that parent” and being “that teacher” – the one who calls in an absence at the very last minute and prays that their colleagues will take pity and help out on their prep. In the span of about 5 minutes I communicate with the secretary who manages absences and subs, my co-teacher for my first class, and my department colleagues. Everyone is understanding and kind, but I still feel like shit for creating an inconvenience for others. I call my husband, who is already at work. And then I wait for the peds office to open so that we can go in for a rapid test.

I don’t really think we are dealing with covid, but this is the right thing to do. What frustrates me to no end is that we didn’t have to be here. There are so many forks in the road where things could’ve gone differently. At a bare minimum, we could at least have cheap, accessible home rapid tests. I tried to buy a couple yesterday, after Natalie was coughing in the morning, but they are out of stock everywhere. This shouldn’t be hard. There should be giant bins of rapid tests at every pharmacy and grocery store, and they should cost $5 max, rather than the current rate of $25+.

Fast forward a few hours. She’s acting fine, the rapid test is negative, and unless something changes overnight, we will be back in business tomorrow. I’ve stress-cleaned the kitchen, done a couple loads of laundry, and cried a couple of times. I’m not exactly sure why. Life goes on. Tomorrow I will bat clean-up for all the stuff at work that didn’t happen today. People understand. My colleagues understand. I know another time it will be my turn to help them out, and I’ll be glad to do it.

so much for that

As it turns out, it was not, in fact, a lack of time that has prevented me from blogging. Because for the last 75 days, I’ve had nothing but time, and I still haven’t written much.

75 days. It’s been 75 days since I last taught a live, in-person class. It was an unusual day, for reasons completely unrelated to the coronavirus. I had a meeting during first hour, returning just in time to teach the rest of my day. We’d had a performance the previous night, which meant the chairs were still in their auditorium-style setup. Since there was to be a second performance that night, I opted to leave the chairs alone and just make it work. COVID-19 was starting to be a topic of conversation, and the idea of “flattening the curve” was starting to enter our vocabulary. I took a few minutes in each class to explain what it meant and why it was important. At some point that day, I learned that our evening performance would be cancelled due to coronavirus concerns, so I had one of my afternoon classes return the room to its normal setup.

How we were to know that this was the last day we’d see our students?

During my planning hour, I received a mass email from church informing us that Sunday’s service would be online-only. My colleagues and I figured that a school closing was a high probability, but we had no idea that our planning-hour conversation would be the last time we were together in the same physical space for… well… 75 days and counting.

optimism

Welp… Here we go, y’all. The girls helped me put this together last night. It doesn’t look quite like this anymore, mostly because they have been fighting over who gets to write on the board. As we speak, they are arguing about whether coat starts with a C or a K. So I think we can cross phonics off the list for today?

Assuming they finish their get-ready stuff (aka “Morning Things”), we should be heading out on a walk soon. After that, we’re going to try some of the Scholastic online resources for our school time. And we’ll do Aunt Abby’s FlipGrid assignment! Our field trip is a virtual visit to the Cincinnati zoo.

Oh, and we’ll also attempt to NOT DIE FROM THE LITERAL PLAGUE.

In other news, the latest Bitmojis are really on point.

Life in Limbo

To my sisters who have recently become online teachers-

There are no definitive answers in Montana today. My close personal friend The Governor just announced four “presumptive positive” Covid-19 cases in The Last Best Place.

As we were called together Friday afternoon during our last recess for an emergency staff meeting, I realized the scenario felt familiar. Seven years ago (almost to the day), I was called into an emergency staff meeting on a Friday afternoon to be told that my school building was closing. Today, as I sit with the “will we/won’t we” anxiety, I’m considering which school-closing scenario is more stressful.

Then (closing a building due to recently discovered structural issues):

• Sudden. No time to anticipate, worry, plan, etc.
• Clear plan and timeline in place.
• Relatively short “chaos period.” Back to some version of business as usual in just over a week.

Now (waiting to see if we’re closing a building due to a worldwide pandemic made worse in our country by a president who fired the entire pandemic response team in 2018):

• Absurdly drawn out anticipation phase.
• Sense of inevitability.
• No forecasted return to normal.
• Conflicted snow day vibes? A part of me is rooting for cancelled school but then I stop and realize that’s pretty messed up because, well, PANDEMIC.

Our family has a pretty epic crisis response ability. It’s like a superpower, I think. Crisis scenario? We’re your people. We will get things done. I mean, read that article I linked above- even I’m impressed with how articulate I managed to be less than an hour after I learned that our school was being shut down. I packed my entire classroom in a matter of hours the following weekend. I unpacked a few essentials into a closet (no classroom for me) in a new building and transferred everything else into storage at another school. All while also attending rehearsals for a community theatre musical and while coming down with one of the worst sinus infections I’ve ever had. When classes resumed, I trekked from classroom to classroom and sang Three Little Birds with 250 elementary students over the first week.

“Don’t worry about a thing, ’cause every little thing- gonna be alright.”

Bob Marley

Like I said, good in a crisis.

Something about the dragged-out anticipation of a coronavirus school closing has stunted my ability to transform into Crisis-Mode Abby. Maybe I don’t get to hop into the phone booth until we’re officially closed, and it turns out that Limbo-Mode Abby is pretty useless. Do I have online lesson plans for next week? No. Do I have regular lesson plans for next week? Also no. For now, I’ll just keep watching for the Bat-Signal. (I’m confusing my superhero references; I’d better stop writing.)

With love from limbo,

An Experienced School Closer

Greetings from Quarantine

What a time to be alive. COVID-19 is taking the nation by storm, and not in a good way. This is day 2 of what is expected to be a 28-day suspension of reality. I went to my regularly scheduled therapy appointment yesterday afternoon, and I couldn’t figure out what to even talk about. Everything has just. Stopped.

Life was relatively normal through Wednesday. On Thursday, schools started implementing some restrictions, like eliminating large events. Church cancelled Sunday services. By the time I rolled over in the middle of the night, sometime around 1 am Friday morning, the governor had mandated that schools close until at least April 6. We have spring break the week of April 6, so this will be a 4-week closure for us. Or maybe it will be more. Who even knows.

Technically, this isn’t really a quarantine, I guess. None of us – so far as we know – have caught the virus. This morning my usual allergy/asthma cough has been a little more present than normal, so you can assume I’ll be panicking about having coronavirus for most of the day. The girls both have run-of-the-mill stuffy noses, and Aaron’s got cold symptoms as well, so if I’m coming down with anything, it’s probably whatever they all have. And, technically, we can still leave the house. Most businesses are still open. Grocery stores are still a thing. But it feels funny. I don’t feel free to leave. We are supposed to be practicing “social distancing”. What’s the point of cancelling everything and shutting the world down if we are going to all go out and about? I hope everyone else is staying put, too, at least as much as they reasonably can. The federal government has been worse than useless, so I’m grateful for a state government that is taking charge.

Will we survive 28 straight days of all being in a house together? Unclear. Here’s hoping.

 

something god alone can see

Bad things happen to good people. We know this, and yet it still hits like a punch to the gut every – single – time.

Just over a week ago, my friend’s wife died, taken by cancer, leaving behind her husband and two young daughters, her family and friends, her congregation, and countless others whose lives she touched. The day we received news of Becky’s death, Lydia’s bedtime Bible story, out of the Jesus Storybook Bible, happened to be the story of Jairus’s daughter being raised from the dead. Below is the final page of that story.

As I read it aloud, in my mind’s eye I imagined Becky, the “still little figure”, as she breathed her last. And then I saw the strong hand of Jesus reaching down into death to grasp Becky’s hand, his sure and steady voice calling her name – “Becky, it’s time to get up!” But unlike the girl in the story, Becky’s awakening was not on this earth. Instead, she opened her eyes to a world too wonderful for words and found herself healed and whole, face to face with her loving Savior.

While trying to wrap my mind around the reality of it all, a song came into my head, something that I am pretty sure I first learned in my youth choir days at my childhood church. Like most hymns, I suppose, the text of the first verse is what was stuck in my head, but it was the last verse that spoke to my heart.

In our end is our beginning; 
in our time, infinity;
in our doubt there is believing;
in our life, eternity.
In our death, a resurrection;
at the last, a victory,
unrevealed until its season,
something God alone can see.

–Hymn of Promise, Natalie Sleeth

Phil, Eva, Ellie, Bud, Patty, Kristen – I love you all and continue to hold you in my heart and in my prayers.

syad wons 5

There are many superstitions about snow days. Spoon under your pillow, pjs inside out, flush ice cubes… And, of course, the first rule about snow days: never talk about snow days. In my classroom, we handle this by instead referring to them as yaD wonS, which is, of course, snow day spelled backwards.

Well, I don’t know who the heck was flushing ice cubes this week, but they must’ve clogged their toilet with them, because we had an entire week of snow days.

What. The. Fork. That never happens.

And what, pray tell, did I do with these 5 days of nothing? Um… Pretty much nothing. I’m just over a week in on cold #2 of the winter (because my upper respiratory system hates me and wants me to be miserable from December to April). My ears are plugged up (which is awesome when you are a musician and music teacher, let me tell you). If I could sell mucous on the black market, I would be able to retire tomorrow. It’s that bad.

And yet… I still have a twinge of guilt, as if I should’ve conquered the world this week- Marie Kondo-ed my entire house – cooked a million freezer meals – planned the rest of the school year – something, anything resembling PRODUCTIVITY. What do I have instead? Several trash cans full of Kleenex, an emptier bottle of NyQuil, an expanded “recently watched” queue on Netflix, a playroom that looks like a toy explosion, a couch with sleeping bags on it, and a kitchen that is just as trashed as it was a week ago. And, hopefully, kids with some fun memories of being couch potatoes during a whole week of snow days.

Self-care? Survival? Some of both, I guess. Hoping for less snot by the time real life resumes on Monday.

now is the winter of our discontent

It has been a long winter.

I feel selfish saying that, because others have surely had winters longer and more difficult than mine. Mine has been a winter of first-world problems. Two rounds of the stomach flu went through our family. Kids have had the usual colds. And I’ve been sick with non-stop congestion of some sort since late January. (Hello, third round of antibiotics.) But we are all here, we are all alive, and in the grand scheme of things I have no complaints.

And yet…

I feel weary. Bone-weary. Tired of the rat race. I love all the things I do, and yet I wish I could just be still for awhile. I wish I felt like I had time to do something fun with my girls. I wish there was space for a dance or music class or something more than the hurry from daycare-to-dinner-to-bed. Saturday and Sunday are for exhaustion and recovery, with no energy for adventures.

Granted, it all looks worse when I’m sick. Round 3 of meds made me so sick to my stomach this morning that I ended up staying home from school. I’m in a low spot of depression and anxiety. Today is not a good day to make decisions.

And yet…

Are my feelings and thoughts only valid when I’m strong? Do I only make good choices when I’m operating outside of anxiety mode? Or does the weakness help me see what’s really important?